Jim Yong Kim

Jim Yong Kim, M.D., Ph.D., became the 12th President of the World Bank Group on July 1, 2012. Jim Yong Kim, M.D., Ph.D., took office as the 17th president of Dartmouth College on July 1, 2009. The first physician to serve as Dartmouth’s president, he also is an anthropologist. President Kim is a co-founder of Partners in Health (PIH) and a former director of the Department of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organization (WHO). His first teaching experience was more than 20 years ago at Harvard University. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in anthropology, social analysis, social medicine, and global health. Before assuming the Dartmouth presidency, President Kim held professorships at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He also served as chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and director of the François Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health. A former executive director of PIH, President Kim continues to serve on its board. The Boston-based nonprofit partners with impoverished communities in Haiti, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi, and the United States to provide medical care and social services. He and Dr. Paul Farmer founded PIH with other colleagues in 1987 while the two were students at Harvard Medical School. The work of Dr. Farmer and PIH was chronicled in the book Mountains Beyond Mountains (Random House, 2003) by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder. Dr. Kim received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 2003. He is married to Dr. Younsook Lim, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston. Born in 1959 in Seoul, South Korea, President Kim moved with his family to the United States at the age of five and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa. His father, a dentist, taught at the University of Iowa, where his mother received her Ph.D. in philosophy. He attended Muscatine High School, where he was valedictorian and president of his class and played quarterback for the football team. President Kim graduated with an A.B. magna cum laude from Brown University in 1982. He earned an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1991 and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University in 1993. He is married to Dr. Younsook Lim, a pediatrician. The couple has two young sons.